 During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas Which was to try one to see if it worked and if it didn't work to eliminate it This method became organized of course into science and it developed very well so that we are now in the scientific age It is such a scientific age in fact that we have difficulty in understanding How which doctors could ever have existed when nothing that they proposed ever really worked or very little of it did But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOs or astrology or some form of mysticism Expanded consciousness new types of awareness ESP and so forth And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did and what has been referred to as my Curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations. So I know something about that Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought. It's a wonderful place. You should go visit there Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was at Esalen There are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about 30 feet above the ocean One of my most pleasurable Experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below To gaze into the clear blue sky above and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her Right away. I began thinking gee. How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe? I'm trying to figure out what to say when the guy says to her. I'm studying massage. Could I practice on you? Sure, she says they get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby I think to myself. What a nifty line. I can never think of anything like that. He starts to rub her big toe I think I feel it. He says I feel a kind of dent. Is that the pituitary? I blurred out. You're a hell of a long way from the pituitary, man They looked at me horrified. I had blown my cover and said it's reflexology. I Quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me I also looked into extra sensory perception and sci phenomena and the latest craze there was Yuri Geller a man Who was supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger So I went to his hotel room on his invitation to see a demonstration of both mind reading and bending keys He didn't do any mind reading that succeeded. Nobody can read my mind I guess and my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it and nothing happened Then he told us it works better under water And so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it and Him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon But then I began to think what else is there that we believe and I thought then about the witch doctors and how Easy it would have been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked So I found things that even more people believe such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods and so forth But if you notice you'll see the reading scores keep going down or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we Continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work It ought to be looked into how do they know that their methods should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress lots of theory But no progress in decreasing the amount of crime by the methods. We use to handle criminals Yet these things are said to be scientific We study them and I think ordinary people with common sense ideas are intimidated by the pseudoscience a Teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is Forced by the school system to do it some other way or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is Not necessarily a good one We're a parent of bad boys after disciplining them in one way or another Feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do the right thing according to the experts So we really ought to look into theories that don't work and science that isn't science. I think the Educational and psychological studies. I mentioned our examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people during the war They saw airplanes land with lots of good materials and they want the same thing to happen now So they've arranged to imitate things like runways to put fires along the sides of the runways To make a wooden hut for a man to sit in with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo Sticking out like antennas. He's the controller and they wait for the airplanes to land They're doing everything right the form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before But it doesn't work. No airplanes land So I call these things cargo cult science because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation But they're missing something essential because the planes don't land Now it behooves me of course to tell you what they're missing But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders How they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of their earphones But there is one feature I noticed that is generally missing in cargo cult science That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school We never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation It is interesting therefore to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly It's a kind of scientific integrity a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty a Kind of leaning over backwards for example If you're doing an experiment you should report everything that you think might make it invalid Not only what you think is right about it other causes that could possibly explain your results and things you thought of That you've eliminated by some other experiment and how they work to make sure the other fellow can tell they've been eliminated Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given if you know them You must do the best you can if you know anything at all wrong or possibly wrong to explain it If you make a theory for example and advertise it or put it out Then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it as well as those that agree with it There is a more subtle problem when you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory You want to make sure when explaining what it fits that those things? It fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory But that the finished theory makes something else come out right in addition In summary the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution Not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another In summary the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your Contribution not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it for example with Advertising last night. I heard the Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest But the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest It's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level the fact that should be added to that advertising statement Is that no oil soaked through food if operated at a certain temperature if operated at another temperature? They all will including Wesson oil So it's the implication which has been conveyed not the fact which is true and the difference is what we have to deal with We've learned from experience that the truth will come out Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were right or wrong Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory and although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement You will not gain a good reputation as a scientist If you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work and it's this type of integrity This kind of care not to fool yourself that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science A great deal of their difficulty is of course the difficulty of the subject and the Inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes didn't land, but they don't land We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves One example Milliken measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know Not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscose the of air It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron after Milliken if you plot them as a function of time You find that one is a little bigger than Milliken's and the next one's a little bigger than that and the next one's a little bit Bigger than that until finally they settle down to a number, which is higher Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of this history Because it's a parent that people did things like this when they got a number that was too high above Milliken's They thought something must be wrong and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong When they got a number closer to Milliken's value They didn't look so hard and so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off and did other things like that We've learned those tricks nowadays and now we don't have that kind of disease But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves of having utter scientific integrity is I'm sorry to say Something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of we just hope you've caught on by osmosis The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool So you have to be very careful about that after you've not fooled yourself It's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. I Would like to add something that's not essential to the science but something I kind of believe Which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife or fooling your girlfriend or something like that When you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi I'm talking about a specific extra type of integrity that is not lying But bending over backwards to show how you are may be wrong That you ought to have when acting as a scientist and this is our responsibility as scientist Certainly to other scientists and I think to layman for example I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio He does work in cosmology and astronomy and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were Well, I said there aren't any he said yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind I think that's kind of dishonest if you're representing yourself as a scientist Then you should explain to the layman what you're doing and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances Then that's their decision One example of the principle is this if you've made up your mind to test a theory or you want to explain some idea You should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out If we only publish results of a certain kind we can make the argument look good We must publish both kinds of results. I Say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state And you decide it would be better in some other state if you don't publish such a result It seems to me you're not giving scientific advice You're being used if your answer happens to come out of the direction the government or the politician like They can use it as an argument in their favor if it comes out the other way they don't publish it at all That's not giving scientific advice Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in their psychology department One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that was something like this It had been found by others that under certain circumstances X rats did something a She was curious as to whether if she changed the circumstance to why they would still do a So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did a I Explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory The experiment of the other person to do it under a condition X to see if she could also get result a and then change To why and see if a changed Then she would know that the real difference was the things she thought she had under control She was very delighted with this new idea and went to her professor and his reply was no You cannot do that because the experiment has already been done and you'd be wasting time This was in about 1947 or so and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat Psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening even in the field of physics I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory Where a person used deuterium in order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen? He had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus When asked why he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program Because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus Because there wouldn't be any new result and so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results In order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes They are destroyed possibly the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes and so on with little clear result But in 1937 a man named young did a very interesting one He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in and Doors along the other side where the food was He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off No, the rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before The question was how did the rats know because the corridor was so beautifully built and so Uniform that this was the same door as before Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors So he painted the doors very carefully arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same still the rats could tell Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run Still the rats could tell Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any common-sense person so he covered the corridor and Still the rats could tell He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand so he covered one after another of all possible clues and Finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door if he relaxed any of his condition The rats could tell Now from a scientific standpoint that is a number one experiment That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible Because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using not what you think it's using and that is the experiment that tells Exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running I Looked into the subsequent history of this research the next experiment and the one after that never referred to mr. Young They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand or being very careful They just went right on running rats in the same old way and paid no attention to the great Discoveries of mr. Young and his papers are not referred to because he did not discover anything about the rats In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science Another example is the ESP experiments of mr. Rhine and other people as various people have made Criticisms and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments They improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller and smaller and smaller until they gradually disappear All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated That you can do again and get the same effects statistically even they run a million rats No, it's people this time They do a lot of things and they get a certain statistical effect Next time they try it. They don't get it anymore And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment This is science This man also speaks about a new institution in a talk in which he was resigning as director of the Institute of Parapsychology and in telling people what to do next he says that one of the things they have to do is Be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get psi results to an acceptable extent Not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results It is very dangerous to have such a policy and teaching to teach students only how to get certain results Rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity So I have just one wish for you the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain The kind of integrity I've described and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization Or financial support or so on to lose your integrity May you have that freedom Thanks for watching